It is behavior consistent with what you should expect as outlined in Leon Festinger’s ‘When Prophecies Fail’. First after the cessation of warming for 16 years and cooling for 10 and the slowing of sea level rises proved to be persistent, they switched to hyping extremes. Roger Pielke Jr in the EPW hearing pretty much disabused the congress of that idea by presenting the facts that showed there were no trends in any of these although don’t expect the media to get it. You see extremes gets eyeballs and sells newspapers or used to.So they have moved onto the Trenberth’s ‘Where’s Waldo’ idea that the heat somehow is hiding in the deep oceans and if nothing else this threatens sea life and coral and fisheries and will eventually reemerge to destroy life as we know it. But the oceans have shown no trend down to 300m in the tropical Pacific which the theory says should be warming most significantly.

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But should they agree with the Russian scientists that we are heading into a Maunder and it will have a significant impact, its all over for the movement. But if Festinger is right, look for them to find another excuse like particulates from China coal plants, just like the cults awaiting the spaceship to take them away say they must have miscalculated on the date and time and will find another day to meet. When they fail, they are forgotten. Remember the hype about the catastrophic solar event in 2012? The Millennium bug that cost trillions? Will we look back on the AGW movement that almost destroyed Europe’s economy and threatens the US and think of the 1980s to 2000s as the good old days with the climate optimum we should of enjoyed instead of wasting trillions to end?

(Reuters) – China’s wheat crop has suffered more severely than previously thought from frost in the growing period and rain during the harvest, and import demand to compensate for the damage could see the country eclipse Egypt as the world’s top buyer.

Interviews with farmers and new estimates from analysts have revealed weather damage in China’s northern grain belt could have made as much as 20 million tonnes of the wheat crop, or 16 percent, unfit for human consumption. That would be double the volume previously reported as damaged.

Historian Geoffrey Parker has a new book out that examines the impact of the Little Ice Age on social, economic and political structures around the globe.

Amazon Abstract:

Revolutions, droughts, famines, invasions, wars, regicides – the calamities of the mid-seventeenth century were not only unprecedented, they were agonisingly widespread. A global crisis extended from England to Japan, and from the Russian Empire to sub-Saharan Africa. North and South America, too, suffered turbulence. The distinguished historian Geoffrey Parker examines first-hand accounts of men and women throughout the world describing what they saw and suffered during a sequence of political, economic and social crises that stretched from 1618 to the 1680s. Parker also deploys scientific evidence concerning climate conditions of the period, and his use of ‘natural’ as well as ‘human’ archives transforms our understanding of the World Crisis. Changes in the prevailing weather patterns during the 1640s and 1650s – longer and harsher winters, and cooler and wetter summers – disrupted growing seasons, causing dearth, malnutrition, and disease, along with more deaths and fewer births. Some contemporaries estimated that one-third of the world died, and much of the surviving historical evidence supports their pessimism.

I do not think that our current global leaders are preparing to deal with extended cooling and reduced agriculture production, they are focused on reducing AGW warming, spending billions to control a natural cycle, when the could be preparing for the Next Grand Minimum. Your thoughts?

This post drew attention to the similarity between the recent warm decades and the period leading up to the extremely cold year of 1740. Now let’s investigate how a 1740-type event might play out. This graph shows the average of the monthly temperatures for the years 1736 to 1739 plotted with the monthly temperatures of the year 1740:

With respect to growing conditions, the 1740 season was a month later than the average of the previous five years and the peak months of the season were 2.5°C cooler. To get a perspective on how a repeat of 1740 might affect growing conditions in the Corn Belt, Bill Fordham, advising the grain industry in the Midwest, has kindly provided an update on the current season: